Creativity Push

I had a little creativity push this week. A dear friend of mine from church asked me to make a whip similar to the cat 0' nine tails used on Jesus to be displayed at the Good Friday service this Friday. I really had no idea what to do so yesterday I decided I was just going to do it. Not that anyone wants to know how to make a whip, but I'm going to tell you how I made it so you can see how the creative process worked.

I picked up a bag of scrap leather strips from Hobby Lobby. Once I was ready to get started I had to determine what exactly I needed. I already had the leather, but I didn't have a handle. I remembered that the kids had broken several croquet mallets so I went outside and found one and sawed it in half. I chose to use the end that had the three color strips on it.

I then sorted out my leather strips. There were a bunch of shoe string sized strips and then in the middle of the clump of strings I found some wider strips that I thought would be perfect and there were exactly 9 of them. Coincidence? I think not.

I started by hot glueing the larger strips to the end of the handle. Once that was done I took several of the shoe string sized strips and glued them over the top portion of the larger strips to cover up the ends. I then tried out the whip on an old table. It didn't sound or feel very powerful so I decided that the tails of the whip needed to be bound a bit more. I took shoe string after shoe string and hot glued them down the larger strips of leather until I got the feel and look I was happy with.

Finally I covered the color strips on the handle with some of the shoe string pieces to make a grip for the handle. I wasn't happy with the overall look so I left it and went and picked up the kids from school.

When I got back I decided that I didn't like the wood showing through so I got some electrical tape and covered the whole handle. The leather underneath gave it a really cool effect. Once that was done it looked better but the tails of the whip seemed to be bare so I went into the garage and found 9 rusty nails and used the shoe string leather to attach them to the ends of each tail. Here's the final product.